I thought i was smart enough to install my stereo in my 98 rs....Not so much. I was impatient and didnt have all the wires taped up. I installed the stereo and heard a pop sound.. Stereo fried. No biggie it was free. but um now my odometer went dead? Does anyone know what possibly could have happened or that I screwed up. And is it safe to take it somewhere and put in a replacement factory stereo from a junkyard? And how do I go about replacing that? Its a little LCD screen. Thanks. And yes I know I was a dummy, dont be mean. Just a girl that wants to listen to some rock and roll in my sweet ride.....

 

oh and btw the car runs fine...No problems with the ecm as far as I can tell.

 

First, repair the wiring. You've created a short to ground. So either you have an exposed wire touching some grounded metal, or most likely you've wired everything wrong.

The short to ground has blown the PWR ACCY fuse, #7, 15A. Once the radio wiring has been repaired and the fuse replaced, everything should work fine.

The fuse panel is located on the side of the dash, driver side.

 

More than likely it's a blown fuse in the fuse box. You won't know till you get in there with a test light and just start looking around visually at each fuse. The car should be fine to drive somewhere to have a shop or someone check it out.

 

Welcome to the site. We have sections of the board for most every type of question and the LSx engine tech area is not the right one for a stereo question. We have a dedicated section just for car audio and electronic tech.
I'm going to move this there.

 

Luckily cars do have that fuse box. Like the others said, repair the wires then replace the blown fuse.

Keep in mind for the future you can get factory harness adapters pretty cheap that allow you adapt the head unit's harness to your factory connector. This creates a clean install because all the wires are accessible and the harness can be assembled out of the car. It becomes plug and play without the hassle of a hard wire install.

 

what you did was either ground out the illumination wire, or you used the illumination wire for power (probalby this one). It isnt designed to power the radio, fuse popped and you lost the guages. It would have tested 12v... but it is not for powering the radio.

both the radio and car are probly fine once you fix the wires and replace the fuse

 

thanks for moving my thread. It was the first time I posted and I didn't realize it was in the wrong area till it was all done. I think the lesson learned is I need to pay attention in all areas of my life. lol. I will check the fuse box again. I checked it the day of and all the fuses were intact. The radio is obviously shorted out as far as I can tell i wired to my other car and it was dead dead dead. So you think there is a wiring problem now that needs fixed before I take it somewhere to install a new stereo? Or can I just take it to someone and see if a new radio would work. I feel like such a dummy for all of this my beautiful camielle is destroyed. Ill get back to y'all on this asap. I am going bananas without a radio. Its been a week or more car still doing fine. I also noticed now the trunk release doesn't work now either, power windows and locks still fine.

 

An installer will note the problems with the car before installation. Depending on the problem they may not fix it. They could even tell you to take it to a mechanic to repair the electrical system before they will install the radio.

 

Just FYI.... If you find the fuses good, you can always look for a burned portion on the circut boards. These are what are used instead of wires to the instrument display and the odometer. If you have someone handy with a soldering iron these can usually be located and repaired easily. I have repaired dozens of instrument panels, and hundreds of stereos that simply shorted to the chassis like yours. A small amount of solder bridges the gap that burns open when shorted.

 

The trunk release relay is powered by the PWR ACCY fuse, the one that you blew, like I told you earlier. Do you know how to check a fuse?

 

replace the pwr accy fuse, i can almost gaurentee that its blown.. i'd put my next paycheck on it unless u fried some serious wiring cuz i dont think there's any fusable links in that area... but i could always be wrong

check your power outlet, if its not working too than its a fact that fuse is blown u can get a new fuse for like 25 cents at autozone